


Memento Mori

by M_Leigh



Series: Hale Family AU [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, The Hale Family, extremely minor sterek at the end, fanfiction of my own fanfiction, partial kate argent pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-11
Updated: 2013-05-11
Packaged: 2017-12-11 13:13:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/799124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Leigh/pseuds/M_Leigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It was not until the second child had come, two years later, that the man realized how truly fortunate he had been in being granted Laura as his firstborn, until he understood how profoundly like him Laura was: for the second child was a boy, and he did not come out screaming, or on time; his mother delivered him into the world two weeks after he was due to arrive, and when he finally landed in the midwife’s waiting hands, he simply opened his clear green eyes and stared at each of them in turn, as though he was not surprised to see them there, as though he knew them already.</i> </p><p>Patrick Hale, through the years. Inspired by an original character in <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/550685">this boy, half-destroyed</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memento Mori

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ravurian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravurian/gifts).



> This is my first AO3 auction fic, for ravurian, who wanted more about Patrick, Derek's older brother who appears in both [this boy, half-destroyed](http://archiveofourown.org/works/550685) and is discussed in [the blood blooms clean in you, ruby](http://archiveofourown.org/works/675389). Neither of those stories operate in the same universe but share certain things, namely the composition of the Hale family/pack, which diverges WILDLY from what we've heard about them in relation to the show's third season. I decided I didn't care? So for instance, we know that Derek's mother is named Talia and was the alpha of the pack, which... is not at all the case here. (I mean, she can be called Talia for the sake of the tag, but you get my drift.)
> 
> In any case, this is basically a series of vignettes around that character, which makes it fanfiction of an original character that I wrote in a fanfiction, which is so gloriously meta I almost can't handle it.
> 
> (Also I feel that I should warn for around 1,700 words of Kate Argent POV, though she's sixteen and not quite so bloodthirsty just yet.)

**1.**

The woman’s first child was a fighter: she could feel it in the womb, the straightforward, no-nonsense energy of it. The baby was born exactly on time, without complications; the woman spread her legs and pushed and screamed and clung to her husband’s hand while the midwife watched the red seam of her split open and the child slid out, slick and bloody and shrieking, as was expected.

“It’s a girl,” the midwife said, while the woman’s husband gaped; the woman had known this, but said nothing to anyone about it. Some things belonged only to a woman and the life inside of her, and that was one of them.

As is often the case with first children, the girl was well-behaved and high-achieving, even as a baby: she rolled over for the first time before she was four months old, was walking with minimal difficulty at ten months, and experienced her first change one week after her first birthday, staring in mute disbelief at what had happened to her carefully trimmed, tiny pink fingernails, which seemed to have been replaced by claws.

Her father turned himself – he had avoided doing this in her presence thus far, on the insistence of her mother, who claimed to have her reasons – so that she could peer up into his distorted face, and stick her clawed hand out to pat the hair that had grown up on either side of his jaw.

Once she had gotten used to her slightly changed body, Laura took to being a werewolf like a duck takes to water: she was then and would always be her father’s favorite child, even when there were four others as competition. He would later become a mostly absent presence in the lives of his children, abstractly dictatorial and vaguely frightening, but typically from a distance; he was, however, besotted with Laura, who followed him with an unmitigated devotion through the forest, learning the packsong and all the other various melodious howls that belong to the wolves in the wood. She ran, he was certain, faster than any other girl her age had ever run before; she climbed better, and jumped higher, and growled more convincingly.

But it was not until the second child had come, two years later, that the man realized how truly fortunate he had been in being granted Laura as his firstborn, until he understood how profoundly like him Laura was: for the second child was a boy, and he did not come out screaming, or on time; his mother delivered him into the world two weeks after he was due to arrive, and when he finally landed in the midwife’s waiting hands, he simply opened his clear green eyes and stared at each of them in turn, as though he was not surprised to see them there, as though he knew them already.

“Give him to me,” his mother croaked, reaching out her trembling hands, and when the midwife gave her her child, she was filled with such an overwhelming sense of joy that she began to cry.

 

 **2.**

When the boy was one, he vanished.

It should not have been hard to find him: he had only just learned how to walk, and his family were all wolves. But there was no scent of him anywhere, only a baffling, terrifying void where his presence had been in the house, that loosened his father’s shoulders – as though some incalculable weight had been lifted from them – and that made his older sister, three years old now and typically possessing an extraordinary ability to control the shifts of her body from one thing to the next, send up a warbling, wailing howl, claws digging deep into the stuffing of the couch.

By the seventh day of the boy’s disappearance, the woman was close to losing her mind: she had not bathed in days, and kept grabbing her other child, who was woozy with fear and cycling between sobbing and screaming jags, and desperately clutching her to her body without attempting to provide her any real comfort.

In later years, both the man and the woman would look back on this episode as the thing that had broken their marriage: not in any practical sense but in some other, deeper region of the soul. Neither of them would live into old age, and they would never stop loving each other, but the woman would always know that the man had been relieved when he son went missing, and the man would know it, too. It would keep him up at night years and years later, the knowledge that he had wanted his son gone, and that he still wanted him gone; that, no matter how hard he tried to love him, he looked at him and felt nothing but fear.

That parents do, in fact, have favorite children is a truth that all parents know but never acknowledge. But there was a difference between the fault of loving one child particularly – as, indeed, the woman would love her youngest child, her darling boy – and loving another not at all. The simple fact of the matter was that the man had had notions about his firstborn son that this son had lived up to not at all. He was of no use to the pack that the man could discern – or, rather, he was certainly useful (uniquely so, in fact) but not in ways that the man could, himself, understand and use to his advantage. Years of paranoia as a child had taught him to consider people first and foremost as tools, gears in the ever-expanding machine that was a pack, and packs needed leaders, soldiers, strategists. His daughter – his Laura – would be a leader, and he had hoped his son would be a strategist, or at least an athlete. He knew, although his son was only one year old, that he would be neither. He could not have said how he knew it: but he knew, deep in his bones, that in his son was something old and terrifying, something utterly outside his understanding. It was in the boy’s eyes when he looked at you: they did not look like a child’s eyes. They looked ancient.

It was, in the end, not the frantically-searching woman but the man who found the boy in the forest. He was under a tree as tall as the sky, curled up with a fox and her litter of cubs, lying down and gazing deep into her beady brown eyes as though he could hear her thoughts in his head, and understood all of them. He rolled over when his father stepped toward him and gazed up at him with much the same expression on his face. His father stopped dead in his tracks, inexplicably afraid, and the fox hissed at him, once, before curling her long tail around her children.

The boy smelled like nothing when he picked him up, and the sharp tug of connection that usually pulled under his breast to all the members of his pack was gone.

 _Who are you_ , the man wondered silently as he crouched down next to him. The boy reached out and grabbed his fingers, and his grip was like iron.

 

**3.**

Later, privately, the woman would tell her son that she had always known, that she had felt it inside of her, when he was nothing more than a heartbeat, only a collection of cells forming something only nominally human, still vaguely amphibious in appearance but already undeniably real: a spark. She told him that she had walked out into the forest and that it had cleaved to her, had bent itself around her and thudded in some foreign region of her chest that made it first hard and then gloriously, gloriously easy to breathe. She had grown up all her life in those woods, in that particular stretch of land; she knew it as well as she knew anything, and yet she felt in those moments that she had never seen it before, that all the hours she had spent there as a child were nothing compared to this, compared to the sheer, ecstatic force of it, the feeling of becoming suddenly the center of the universe.

For the rest of them, it was only when the man brought his son home from the wilderness, and saw the moss that had sprung up on all the trees on the path he took back toward home, moss of a particularly vibrant shade that appeared to have grown in roughly the shape of a very small person’s hands, over and over again, around two feet from the earth. The man looked down at his son, who was consenting to be carried without any fuss, and imagined for an instant what would happen if he simply put him down and ran away from him as fast as he could. Instead he carried him all the way home, delivered him into his sobbing mother’s waiting arms, and retreated back into the woods himself, as a wolf this time, falling into the bone-shattering twisting change that allowed him, so mercifully, to forget himself, or at least to be himself in a simpler way.

The man (who was now also a wolf, and so perhaps not really a man anymore at all) ran through the woods he had been searching for days, reclaiming them, pissing petulantly along the inexplicable moss, and bursting through the trees to the hollow where the fox was sheltering with her cubs, howling with such horrible intent that the mother’s instinct to preserve herself trumped her instinct to protect her children – a fact that, although they were only foxes, would destroy something between her and her cubs forever – sending her dashing away from danger and leaving the tiny babies, still pink and mewling, shaking with fear below the wolf’s snarling and snapping jaw. But he did not kill them, just paced around the clearing for a while, as though he were waiting for something, and then, without warning, disappeared.

When he returned home, the woman was lying in their bed with both of their children, sleeping properly for the first time in a week now that she had her babes in her arms again. The man (who remained, it should be noted, a wolf) curled up on the floor at the foot of the bed, resting his snout on his legs, and managed to sleep for only a few hours, fitfully; when he awoke, he was not rested.

After that, the boy’s peculiar abilities manifested in manifold ways: the wind blew when he was upset about something (which was unsettlingly infrequently), water filled the imprints his small feet made in the soft mud of the forest floor, and sometimes, when he slept very deeply, a pinprick of light opened above where he lay. So enrapturing was this strange manifestation of power that anybody who saw it could not help but stop and stare, intoxicated, until something snapped her out of her daze.

As the years passed, the man continued to train his daughter for the responsibilities that he knew would one day await her, and Laura became as fierce a child as ever had walked on the earth. Her mother had suggested she be signed up for the town’s intramural soccer league, to which her father grudgingly agreed on the basis of potential leadership skills she might acquire through the playing of an organized sport; Laura, unlike the other six-year-olds, possessed both the physical skill and the tactical sensibility to actually play the game, and as such was a great favorite with around ten percent of her teammates, and despised by the rest of them. She did not care as long as she was scoring.

The man and woman sat with their other child on the sideline at her games, and the boy, despite being only four years old, watched the players in front of him with an unsettling intensity and understanding, and was often the first person to clap when his sister had made a good play, even before the adults present realized what had happened. His father took advantage of the nominal excuse of Laura’s primacy in these moments to ignore his son completely; in an attempt to compensate, the boy’s mother pulled him onto her lap and cuddled him, sticking her cold nose against the bare skin of his neck without having to worry about him losing control of himself: he was not like her, and his father, and sister. He was a little human boy, as far as she could tell, and for all his preternatural maturity and unsettling knowingness about the world, he was still four, and squirmed and giggled with delight when her nose touched his skin.

 

 **4.**

Parents, it is known, have favorite children; children, equally, have a favorite parent in nine out of ten instances. Until she was around twelve years old, Laura Hale’s favorite parent vacillated from week to week, day to day, minute to minute; she and her father had more in common, and he paid more attention to her than he did to any of her siblings, even Cooper and Alice, who were both so desperate to please him. Patrick and the baby – his name, she knew, was Derek; in her mind, he remained _the baby_ even at two years old – belonged entirely to their mother. But Laura thought, sometimes, that she was a little more like her mother than her father, and on the days when her mother was particularly kind to her, she rose sharply in her daughter’s favor, while her husband fell.

It was not until she was twelve – the year she entered the seventh grade, and kissed a boy for the first time (the unfortunately named Trevor Hartigan, who pulled back and made a face that suggested that he was around as disgusted by what had transpired as she was) – that her father managed to alienate her so successfully that he never entirely returned to the godlike pedestal he had heretofore occupied in her internal hierarchy of the universe. He did not do anything to her to provoke such a fall – or, well, not exactly. The offense, that is, was not to Laura but to her brother.

Patrick, who was only two years younger than his sister and the only human in the family, was easily Laura’s favorite sibling: the rest of them – six, five, and two respectively – were too young to be interesting, and Laura had no particular maternal instinct, except when it came to the baby, who was so wrapped up in their mother’s being that he rarely needed to be cared for or attended to. And though Patrick was technically two years her junior, she treated him as though he were older than she was, for Laura was, above all things, a pragmatist, and she had no difficulty recognizing when somebody else knew more about the world than she did. Patrick was ahead of her, and would probably always be ahead of her, in this. She was not bothered by it: she was not the sort of person who wondered about the deep mysteries of the universe. She was a doer. She achieved things. (She was, as a seventh grader, already the captain of her middle school’s girls’ soccer and softball teams.)

Patrick fell into no category of person that Laura had ever encountered and she was in awe of him as a result. Despite self-identifying forcefully as a Leader of People even at such a tender age, she followed her younger brother around with no compunctions: he always, after all, lead her somewhere interesting.

On the day in question – the fateful day when she saw her father for what he truly was, for the first time in her life – she and Patrick were out in the woods next to a little tributary of the nearby river, crouched precariously on rocks slippery with river gunk. He had rolled up the sleeve on his slightly-too-large coat and had stuck his hand into the water, and she watched, mesmerized, as all the small creatures of the river gathered around it, radiating outward in strange, unnatural harmony instead of fleeing or trying to eat each other. There were little fish and water bugs and even one or two small turtles. The braches above them were full of birds, watching the scene below with cocked heads, chirping occasionally and, eerily, in tandem.

“How do you make them do that?” Laura asked in hushed tones, despite knowing perfectly well that no satisfying answer would be forthcoming.

Patrick, predictably, shrugged. “I don’t make them,” he said. “They just do.”

Laura thought about saying, _I wish I could do that_ , but realized as she thought it that she didn’t, really. Life was considerably easier with only the fact of being a werewolf to contend with: Patrick was _weird_ , and people outside of the family Did Not Understand Him, as her mother often said portentously. Patrick himself seemed unconcerned by this: he had been teased in the playground of their elementary school on occasion, and had placidly ignored the children in question. It was Laura who had threatened to beat them up, and followed up on her threat as often as she could get away with it without her teacher seriously disciplining her. She had not entirely escaped being teased, either – she was, after all, tomboyish – but had reacted to her own antagonists with considerably less force than that with which she persecuted her brother’s would-be tormentors. Her mother often told her that this quality would make her a good alpha one day, a fact about which Laura, in turn, often preened.

They were still crouched by the side of the stream when their father appeared out of the woods, huffing a little and looking irritated that he had had to come all the way out here to fetch them for dinner. Laura felt a momentary pang of guilt – it was darker out than she had realized – before all thoughts flew out of her mind as she watched her father’s face twist into something frightening as he saw what Patrick was doing, and strode forward to wrench him away from the water by the back of his coat.

Patrick was small for his age, delicate and pale-skinned under his dark shock of hair, and his limbs flailed as his father dragged him backwards. The birds began shrieking and leapt away from their perches and the stream, which had been so peacefully only moments before, shattered into chaos as all the myriad creatures remembered themselves and scattered in every direction.

“ _What have I told you about doing that_ ,” the man was shouting at his son, fangs bared, claws digging into his child’s jacket. The boy’s feet were dangling in midair and Laura saw that he was not fighting back at all, just hanging limply in his father’s grip and allowing himself to be violently shaken, his scrawny neck snapping back and forth worryingly as his father continued to shout at him. Laura did not know what he was saying; she had stopped paying attention.

She did not think at all about what she was doing before she did it, just let out a high-pitched yowl and threw herself at her father’s leg and bit him with her sharp little teeth, so hard that he made an undignified yelping sound, and dropped his son unceremoniously onto the ground, where he sat up and pulled his knees to his chest without saying anything. Laura growled up at her father, baring her teeth at him and _daring_ him to come at her. She was not thinking rationally about the fact that her father was three times her size and her alpha: she was simply doing what she was used to doing, what she did on instinct. Nobody was allowed to touch her brother whom he did not want to touch him. Nobody, especially, was allowed to hurt him.

Her father stepped back and tugged on his ripped pants to inspect the damage before scowling down at both of them and telling them they had better hurry up home if they wanted dinner. He tramped back into the trees, leaving them alone, and Laura waited a few minutes before tugging Patrick up and following.

None of the three of them said anything over dinner, letting Alice and Cooper bicker instead, but Laura hung around the kitchen afterward, helping her mother do the dishes and not quite saying anything. Her mother, who was a wise woman, waited her daughter out.

“Mom,” Laura said finally, staring intently at the pot she was drying, “why is Papa mean to Patrick?”

Her mother did not say anything for a long moment.

“He’s mean to him because he’s afraid of him,” she told her, and then was silent.

But later that night, she crept into her son’s bedroom, her son’s bedroom where he was not sleeping but instead staring at the ceiling. She was holding his littlest brother on her hip and settled him down in the bed with him. He moved aside automatically to make room for Derek, who at two still sucked resolutely on the two middle fingers of his right hand, and who curled sleepily against his older brother’s bigger body before letting his eyes flutter closed, suckling softly at his fingers.

“Hey, baby,” she said, running her fingers along his hair.

“Hi, Mom,” he whispered, resolutely not looking at her. He was only a little boy, after all, who wanted his father to love him. It was easy to forget, she thought, that there was this in him, too, this banal human thing.

“I love you,” she told him.

“I love you too,” he mumbled, and she stayed crouched by his bed until he had fallen asleep.

 

**5.**

Kate Argent was sixteen when her family “moved home” to a town she’d never heard of. She transferred from Longwood High to Beacon Hills High School in late October, which her new guidance counselor made sure to tell her was a weird time of year to do that, as though Kate didn’t know that, hadn’t changed schools countless times before.

“I hope it won’t be a problem,” Kate said instead of what she was actually thinking, and made sure to make her eyes go really wide and pathetic-looking until Mrs. Hartt softened and muttered something about making sure she got all the help she needed to adjust.

Kate rolled her eyes the second she got out of the office and flipped her hair over her shoulder, a move perfected years earlier in a bout of obsessive repeat viewings of _Clueless_. Kate’s dad may have reminded her every day of her life that she was a hunter, but that didn’t mean she dressed all in black and hated humor, okay? Kate knew she was funny. She made people laugh all the time, and that was pretty much the definition of being funny, even if her jokes were mostly kind of mean. She was mostly kind of mean, but since her father said it was a good quality in a hunter, she wasn’t too bothered about it.

She and her dad moved into a ridiculously huge house, given that there were only two of them: Chris was living in Los Angeles with his _girlfriend_ , whom Kate privately thought was a waste of time but whom Chris seemed to like, so whatever. On the first night they spent there, he rolled out a big map of the town on the kitchen table and showed her where all the wolves in town lived: they were all in the same family, no omegas. The Hales had a big house in the woods where they all lived except one, a man called Peter, who had an apartment in a shitty building across town but apparently didn’t stay there all that often.

“What are we going to do about them?” Kate asked. She didn’t really want to transfer schools again this year, but summer would come eventually.

“Nothing, yet,” her father said, staring down at the map. “They haven’t done anything.”

Kate personally thought the code – which her father abided by and about which Chris was borderline obsessive, because he was a _nerd_ – was a load of bullshit, since whenever they stayed around long enough, _something_ always happened that allowed them to hunt within the bounds of their precious code. Kate did not like waiting: she liked doing what she was going to do when she wanted to do it, regardless of consequences. (The move from Longwood had been precipitated both by werewolf drama and Kate punching a junior girl in her gym class in the nose. She hadn’t done it randomly, she’d had a _reason_ – the girl was talking shit about Chris, whom she’d met _once_ , just to get Kate mad, and Kate didn’t mind admitting that it had worked. The other girl had walked around with two black eyes for a couple of weeks, which Kate thought was retribution enough.)

Once she was an actual adult and didn’t have to go to school anymore or live with her dad, she was going to work for long enough to save up money for a car, and then get the hell out of dodge. She was going to be a real hunter, not like Chris, who spent so much time working out moral equivalences in his head for killing people that he barely got around to actually getting the job done, half the time. If you were going to kill somebody, Kate thought, you ought to just _do_ it. It wasn’t like Chris cared about werewolves, anyway; he just wanted to feel better about himself in the morning, when he woke up with blood on his hands.

This trait was, as far as Kate was concerned, both unbecomingly effete and also really fucking stupid, since it gave them time to go after you, instead of the other way around. Chris had flirted with the idea of studying philosophy in college, and she had reamed him so successfully – only twelve at the time, snickering – that he’d switched to economics instead.

Still, she was only sixteen, which meant she didn’t actually have access to the gun locker in the basement unless her dad gave her the key, which happened infrequently. Instead, when she heard her American history teacher call out _Patrick Hale_ and watched as a scrawny kid with messy hair raised his hand, she thought she’d work on her undercover skills, which were, at that stage, shaky at best.

She found him eating by himself in the cafeteria at lunch, so she put her tray down across from his and sat down without ceremony. He looked up at her, blinking: he was actually kind of pretty, she thought, if you went for that sort of thing. He had very white skin and very black hair, and was probably not as skinny as his oversized army jacket made him look, which was extremely.

“Hi,” she said, trying to look fragile and uncertain. “I’m new. Do you – is it okay if I sit here?”

He took a bite of his apple and chewed before answering. “You probably should have asked before you sat down, if you wanted that to seem convincing.”

Kate blinked. The Hale boy smiled. She wondered if he could hear her lying: her grandfather had told her stories about that, about werewolves listening to your heart for inconsistencies, but she’d always thought it sounded kind of ridiculous.

“You can sit there,” he continued, and smiled. “We can pretend you’re not going to go home and tell your family what you think of me.”

“Like _you_ aren’t going to go home to _your_ family and tell them what you think of _me_?” she retorted.

He shrugged. “It depends.”

“On what?”

“How interesting you are,” he said, raising his eyebrows and taking another bite of his apple. “Whether you tell me you’re planning on hunting us down in our sleep.”

“We’re not allowed,” she said somewhat petulantly, even though she probably shouldn’t have. “We have a _code_.”

“Right,” he said, sounding amused. “I’ve heard about that.”

“It’s bullshit,” she told him.

“You should probably just kill me right here, in the cafeteria,” he said mildly. “It would be so much more economical.”

Thus was tentatively born what Kate Argent would later consider most bizarre friendship of her relatively short life, which lasted for six months and rarely passed beyond the school grounds (though the space under the bleachers, filled with dried grass and used condoms, was an oft-frequented spot). It was, she grudgingly admitted to herself, nice to know somebody who actually knew what she spent most of her time thinking about, and training for, even if he was the nominal target of her efforts.

He didn’t usually argue with her about it too often, though – in fact, they didn’t talk about werewolves and hunting very much at all. Sometimes she asked him obviously information-gathering questions about his family, which he ignored, and sometimes she said things about werewolves being animals just to provoke him, which never worked. Mostly they talked about nothing: or, more accurately, about Julia Lopate’s hideous wardrobe and how jealous she clearly was of Kate despite the fact that Kate could not give less of a flying fuck about her (technically a lie; she had, in a bout of vengeance, written some very crude things about Julia Lopate in one of the bathroom stalls of the girls’ bathroom in the science wing); about the fact that their history teacher was the most annoying person either of them had ever encountered (Kate was even including Chris, who was _infuriating_ , in this reckoning, which she considered significant); about Kate’s problems with her hair, which she’d gotten cut in a truly disastrous fashion, and other trivialities. They skirted the issues of Patrick’s family and touched only briefly upon Kate’s father.

It kind of sucked, she sometimes thought, that she was probably going to have to kill him someday.

She told him as much, once, lying on her back under the bleachers; he smiled, crossing his legs at the ankle, and answered that he wasn’t actually a werewolf. So.

“Wait,” she said, sitting up. “You’re – wait. What?”

“I figured you’d have checked by now,” he said, surprised. “With, you know. Mountain ash in my locker, or something.”

“No,” she said. “I, um. Didn’t.” Her dad, she thought somewhat hysterically, would be _so horrified_ if he knew this conversation was happening.

“I’m human,” he said, which was the first in a series of incredibly predictable events – all precipitated by Kate and acquiesced to by a somewhat bemused Patrick – that ultimately culminated in the two of them making out in the woods in the middle of the night. It was April by this point, and not quite as cold as it could have been, and Kate felt hot all over anyway, so she didn’t really care about the weather. She had kissed a lot of boys by the time she turned sixteen, not necessarily of her own volition, and hadn’t often enjoyed it. This, she enjoyed a lot. She thought she seemed more into it than Patrick, who was leaning against a tree and kind of letting it happen; she also didn’t particularly care.

The next day, a Saturday, she told her father over breakfast that she was sort of – friends – with one of the Hales, and he was laughing at her before she could even finish her sentence.

“You’re not friends with that boy,” he said.

“He’s _human_ ,” she said, and he just kept laughing.

“You know, sometimes I wonder about you,” he said finally, when he had calmed down. “How a child of mine could have come out so goddamn stupid. Chris may be soft, but at least there’s a brain in his skull.”

He continued in this vein for some time.

She went out back, that afternoon, tacked a target to a tree, and pumped bullets into the trunk until she couldn’t feel her arm or her shoulder anymore. When Patrick said hi to her in school on Monday, she ignored him, and flipped her hair.

(Eight years later, after having left Beacon Hills once and then come back again, older and wiser about the world, she told Josh to make sure he got the oldest brother first. She didn’t stop to think about what his face must have looked like, blown apart by a bullet to the back of his skull, but when she ran out into the forest, the house burning behind her, she thought she could hear the trees around her screaming, their roots coming up to try to wrap themselves around her ankles, the wind wailing in her ears, blowing smoke after her.)

 

**6.**

Being nine, Derek had decided, was horrible. He had been nine for three days, and all that had happened during those three days was that Laura had yelled at him for bothering her while she was busy doing something stupid on the internet, his mother had gotten sick with some nasty werewolf flu that wasn’t even supposed to exist, his father had yelled at him for no reason, and Cooper had tackled him for no reason and broken his wrist, which had of course healed instantly, but which had still made him cry.

He had three-hundred-and-sixty-two days left of being nine, which seemed like a lot.

Nobody was home except his mother, who was sleeping in order to overcome her flu, and Patrick, whom Derek could hear puttering around in the kitchen. He slunk in, stood on his toes to get down a plastic cup, and filled it up with water before sitting morosely at the kitchen table and waiting for Patrick, who was in fact making a sandwich, to pay attention to him.

“You want a sandwich, Derek?” Patrick asked. Derek shrugged, staring intensely down into his half-empty cup, trying to look as miserable as possible. His brother did not take the bait, just peeled two more slices of bread off of the loaf and piled them with turkey and cheese.

“Here you go,” he said when he put the plate down in front of Derek, and sat down across from him with his own, considerably shorter sandwich. Derek stared at it gloomily before picking it up to take a perfunctory bite.

He continued like this for some time, slowly picking the crusts off and ripping them into tiny pieces in-between occasional bites while his brother methodically made his way through his lunch.

“All right,” Patrick said when he had finished, surveying the disaster that was Derek’s plate. “What’s going on.”

Derek shrugged, staring down at his food. Patrick leaned forward, resting his chin on his hands and peering across the table at him.

“Don’t pretend that you don’t normally like that sandwich,” Patrick said. “It’s got three times as much meat as a normal person likes to eat.”

“I’m normal,” Derek mumbled, kicking his legs vindictively against the legs of his chair, since he couldn’t stomp them on the ground: they weren’t long enough.

“No, you’re not,” Patrick said with a smile. “It’s okay, nobody wants to be normal.”

Derek stared up at his brother, trying to wrap his mind around how somebody he considered smarter than everybody else he knew _combined_ could be so glaringly, obviously wrong about something so simple.

“Yes they _do_ ,” he said, affronted.

“Smart people don’t,” he said mildly.

“I guess I’m not smart, then,” Derek said gloomily, going back to gazing at his destroyed meal.

Patrick laughed and sat back in his chair. “Yes, you are,” he said.

Melanie Schwartz, who sat next to Derek in school, had laughed at him the day before for misspelling “constitution,” which he had thought was a pretty hard word but which was apparently _not_ , or else she wouldn’t have laughed at him for not knowing how to spell it. He had had to concentrate _really hard_ to keep himself from wolfing out in front of her and had wound up crying instead, which was possibly even worse. She had laughed more, and he had cried more, which made her laugh; the whole thing was a vicious cycle.

He realized with a kind of distant horror that his eyes were getting watery just _thinking_ about it, which was completely unacceptable. He blinked several times in rapid succession, staring so intently at his food that it had stopped looking like anything real at all, and hunched his shoulders as though that might stop what felt like a tidal wave of tears just waiting to be unleashed.

“All right,” Patrick said, standing up. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”

Derek sniffed, wiping surreptitiously at his nose with his sleeve.

“What – what about our dishes?” he asked wetly.

“Leave them,” Patrick said, reaching down to pull him to his feet. “We’ll deal with them later.”

“Okay,” Derek said, and hiccoughed.

Once Patrick had gotten him in his coat – he usually insisted to his mother that he didn’t _need_ one, that it was only October and he was always warm anyway, but she was paranoid about hypothermia and also about people from town seeing her children running around in the freezing cold without appropriate outerwear, so the coats stayed. Now he just let Patrick stick his arms through the sleeves, which was stupid because he was nine years old now and could do that by himself, but still: it was kind of nice to have somebody else do it.

When they got outside, Patrick crouched down and looked at Derek over his shoulder expectantly until Derek plastered himself along his back, wrapping his arms around his neck, and when Patrick stood up he hooked his arms under Derek’s legs, holding him in place. The truth was that Derek, despite being a werewolf and therefore a nominally terrifying creature, was very small for his age. Melanie Schwartz, in fact, was a solid four inches taller than he was, which he found profoundly unfair. And Patrick, despite being extremely skinny, was considerably stronger than he looked. Derek laid his head down on the back of his brother’s neck and watched the forest go by as he walked.

The forest was different, when he was with Patrick. At nine he did not yet have the vocabulary to describe how, precisely, this was so, but that did not prevent him from knowing deep in his bones that the forest he saw when he was alone and the one he saw when he was in Patrick’s company were radically different. His heartbeat slowed to something unfamiliar, thumping in time with Patrick’s underneath him, which was itself – though he could not have known this – the heartbeat of the forest, the live nerves of it sparking beneath his brother’s feet as he walked. Derek had never felt as safe, and would never feel as safe again, as he did deep in the woods with his brother.

His eyes were closed and he was drifting in and out of consciousness when Patrick suddenly stopped moving, and tightened his hands on Derek’s legs.

He blinked blearily, finding himself surrounded by familiar and unremarkable pines, before he turned his head and saw the boy in front of them, sitting by the river and poking into it with a stick. Patrick leaned down and let go of Derek’s legs before reaching one hand up to the hands clasped around his neck and pulling them apart.

Derek stood next to him, peering at the boy, who seemed utterly unremarkable to him in every way. He did not know enough younger children to be able to tell how old the boy was, except that he was very little (he was, in fact, four years old), and that it seemed unlikely that he was supposed to be out in the middle of the woods by himself.

“Hello,” Patrick said, and the boy looked up, vaguely surprised but not frightened.

“Hi,” he said, and went back to poking at the stream.

“What have you got, there?” Patrick asked.

“Fishes,” the boy said, and when Derek leaned forward and tried to look as closely as he could at the water, he thought he saw the shimmering movements of minnows flickering around the boy’s stick.

“I see,” Patrick said. “What’s your name?”

The boy paused. “…Sam,” he said, and you did not have to be a werewolf to know that he was lying. Patrick raised his eyebrows, and the boy had the decency to look ashamed of himself.

“My real name’s stupid,” he mumbled. “I don’t _like_ it.”

“All right,” Patrick said. “What’s your last name, then?”

“Stilinksi,” the boy said, very slowly, in the manner of someone who has spent a long time practicing.

“Your dad works at the station, doesn’t he?” Patrick asked, and the boy was nodding when he seemed to remember the rules he had presumably been taught about talking to strangers, and froze, eyes wide.

“My name’s Patrick,” Patrick said. “This is Derek.”

“Um,” the boy said.

“We live in the Hale house, over the ridge,” Patrick told him, and the boy relaxed a little.

“Okay,” he said.

“Your dad is probably worried about you, don’t you think?” Patrick said. “And your mom?”

The boy shrugged.

“How long have you been out here?” Patrick asked.

“Dunno.”

He took a few steps forward, toward the boy, but Derek didn’t move, just scraped his feet back and forth over the wet leaves and mud and fiddled with the edges of his coat sleeves, which were too long for his arms.

“They don’t know where you are, do they?” Patrick asked, and the boy shook his head hesitantly, as though he didn’t want to admit it. “So don’t you think they’re worried?” he continued, and the boy’s bottom lip started to wobble.

“No,” he whispered.

“Why’s that?”

“I’m – I’m – I’m a _handful_ ,” the boy said, as though he had heard it somewhere before. “And – they _don’t know what they’re going to do with me_.” A tear slid down his cheek.

“Well, everybody is a handful sometimes,” Patrick said. “I was definitely a handful. Derek is a handful.”

Derek scowled.

“That doesn’t mean they aren’t worried about you,” Patrick told the boy, though he looked skeptical, behind his tears. “Your dad’s probably got every police officer in town out looking for you right now.”

“He can’t do that,” the boy said, wiping at his face. “He doesn’t have – seniority.”

“He was probably pretty convincing,” Patrick told him.

“Why did you come out here?” he asked a minute later, when the boy had stopped crying and was just staring morosely down at the river, face splotchy. He shrugged.

“I like it,” he said.

“Me, too,” Patrick said. “Could you look at me for a minute, please?”

The boy blinked and turned up to look at him, and Derek pulled his coat closer, shivering. Patrick and the boy sat there for what felt like a very long time, staring at each other, until finally Patrick reached out his hand and touched the boy’s forehead, the buzzed bristles of his hair, and Derek sat down all of the sudden, violently, because he thought the ground started to move.

It wasn’t that, though – at least, he didn’t think so. It was something else: it was the space around the two of them moving, pulsing invisibly; it was the world slowing down; it was the tiny shimmering points of light behind Derek’s eyelids that appeared when he closed his eyes, and the silence that seemed suddenly to have engulfed them.

And then it stopped.

Derek opened his eyes and found himself lying on the ground. He pushed himself up and looked over at Patrick, who was pulling up the Stilinski boy by the hand. The woods looked just as they always had.

“Come on,” Patrick said. “Let’s take Mr. Stilinski home.”

The walk out to the road took a lot longer than it should have, because the boy kept wandering off whenever he got distracted by _anything_ , which Derek privately thought _did_ make him seem like a handful, though he was smart enough not to say as much. Besides, Patrick was watching him with a weird expression on his face that Derek didn’t recognize at all, and he had at least learned in his first nine years of existence that when his brother was acting peculiar that it was best to stay quiet and wait for an explanation, whether or not one would ultimately be forthcoming.

Once they made it to the road, Patrick asked the boy how to get back home, and the boy directed him dutifully. It was almost dark by the time they finally reached his house, and he had been sleeping on Patrick’s back for a while, his mouth sagging open and drooling all over the back of Patrick’s coat. Derek grumbled to himself that _he_ didn’t do that when Patrick carried _him_ on his back, but it was difficult to stay annoyed for very long with the boy, who was half his size and significantly more breakable. If Cooper had broken _his_ wrist, it would not have healed for weeks and weeks.

Derek found this thought strangely disturbing.

When they finally did reach the house, Patrick carefully shifted the boy around into his arms, and rubbed his back until his eyes opened slowly and he yawned, sticking his fist into his face like a baby might.

“We’re here,” Patrick said.

“Mmm,” the boy said, and put his head back down on Patrick’s shoulder.

“Come on,” Patrick said to Derek, and started walking to the door. “Can you ring the bell?” he asked when they reached the porch, so Derek did.

He could hear the panicked, thundering footsteps rushing toward the door very clearly, and was not at all surprised when a woman threw the door open, and started crying when she saw her son.

“Hi, Mrs. Stilinski,” Patrick said. “We found your son out in the woods.”

“Oh, my god,” she was saying, over and over again, and the sound of his mother’s voice seemed to finally rouse the boy from his slumber.

“Mama?” he said drowsily, and she reached out hungrily to take him from Patrick, who handed him over carefully into her waiting arms.

“You are the stupidest, stupidest boy,” she said, laughing, and pressing her wet face against his head.

“Sorry, Mama,” he mumbled.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Stilinski said, looking first at Patrick and then at Derek before turning around and shouting, “ _John!_ ”

Mr. Stilinski – whom, Derek realized, he had seen before, at boring anti-drug school events – appeared behind her, looking equally distraught.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he said, reaching out to touch his son’s head. Derek shuffled to his left and reached up to grab Patrick’s hand. He squeezed it back.

“He was fine,” Patrick said. “Just playing in the woods.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Stilinski said. “You’re – you’re the Hale kids, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Patrick said. “I’m Patrick, and this is Derek.”

“Nice to meet you both,” he said. “It’s – it’s very nice to meet you.”

“You, too,” Patrick said, and turned to start walking down the front walk, tugging Derek along with him.

“You sure you boys don’t want a ride all the way back out there?” Mr. Stilinski said.

“No, we’re all right,” Patrick said over his shoulder. “It’s not so far.”

Derek glanced back at them once more, when they were almost down to the road, standing in the doorway, dark shadows against the electric light.

He didn’t say anything for a long time, because whenever he looked up at his brother, he looked sad. Patrick didn’t look sad very often.

“Why were the fish doing that?” he asked eventually, when they were at the outskirts of the forest again.

“It’s hard to explain,” Patrick said.

“Is he going to be okay?” he asked, strangely bothered by the idea.

“For now,” Patrick said, and stopped to look down at him.

“You’re going to live a long life,” he said, reaching down to touch his forehead, the place between his eyes, the bridge of his nose. “You’re going to live a long, long time.”

“What?” Derek asked, confused, and Patrick reached up to ruffle his hair.

“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

 

**7.**

Many years later, Derek Hale would find himself in the living room of that same house, attempting to explain to John Stilinski, with very limited success, that his son was a magic-worker.

“Is there a _name_ for this, this – thing?” Sheriff Stilinski asked, rubbing his eyes.

“Uh,” Derek said. “Not that I know of. Sir.”

“Stop calling me sir,” Stilinski grumbled. “Christ.”

Derek found himself wishing, rather morosely, that Stiles was in the room, but he had gotten up five minutes before, thrown his hands in the air, and said, “I can’t take any of this anymore, there’s no explanation except that I have secret magic genes, I’m going outside,” and vanished into the backyard.

“I just don’t see how it’s _possible_ ,” the sheriff said, with the stubborn skepticism of somebody who, some weeks before, had tried for a long time to convince himself that the werewolves he had discovered sitting in his kitchen were a figment of his imagination.

“I don’t, either,” Derek said, as patiently as he could. “My brother was the same – well, sort of – and nobody ever had an explanation for that either.”

“Wait,” Stilinski said. “Which brother?”

“Uh,” Derek said, surprised. “Patrick. He was the oldest boy –”

“I remember all your siblings,” Stilinski said, and Derek looked down at his hands. “He was a good kid.”

“I – yeah,” he said. “I guess.”

When he looked up, the sheriff was peering at him curiously. “You don’t remember, do you?”

“Remember what?” Derek asked.

He hummed. “Stiles got lost in the woods once, when he was – god, he must’ve been four, five. We were – we were going crazy. You and your brother brought him back.”

Derek stared at him. “No,” he said eventually. “No, I don’t remember that.”

“Well, it was a long time ago,” the sheriff said. “He was an odd one, your brother.”

Derek swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess he was.”

When Sheriff Stilinski finally gave up trying to understand what was going on with his son, and shooed Derek out of the house while he made dinner, Derek found himself out in the backyard, standing over Stiles, who was lying on his back, moving his hand in vague circles above the ground next to him. He watched for a moment as the blades of grass followed the invisible pull of Stiles’ fingers, then looked back up at his face, which was scrunched up as he looked up at him.

“You’re standing, like, right next to the sun, dude,” Stiles said. “I’m going to go blind.”

Derek huffed and sat down next to him.

“How’d it go?” Stiles asked, leaning his head back in the grass and closing his eyes. Derek shrugged.

“He’s confused,” he said. Stiles snorted.

“No shit,” he said. “He’s going to keep being confused until he just decides he doesn’t give a fuck anymore.”

“I guess,” Derek said, rubbing his fingers nervously against each other.

“Do you remember getting lost in the woods as a kid?” he asked a moment later, and Stiles blinked and peered up at him.

“No,” he said. “Why?”

“Your dad said you did,” Derek said. “He said – my brother and I found you and brought you home.”

“No shit,” Stiles said.

“I don’t remember it at all,” Derek said. “I don’t – I don’t know why I can’t remember it.”

“Well, you would’ve been pretty young, too,” Stiles said.

“I know,” he said. “I just – I wish I did.”

Stiles looked up at him for a long moment before reaching out and grabbing his hand, rubbing his fingers gently at the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. Derek had spent a lot of time, in the past few months, convincing himself that the strange sparks the gathered under his skin whenever Stiles touched him was a side-effect of whatever magic was singing in his veins, before finally accepting the fact that this was simply what it felt like to have somebody else’s skin against your own, somebody else whom you liked, and who – possibly – liked you.

“I don’t like forgetting,” he admitted finally, as Stiles ran the pads of his fingers down the center of his palm, along his lifeline. Alice had gotten into that, one year: Tarot cards, palm readings, tea leaves. Peter had visited that Christmas and rolled his eyes at her, teased her mercilessly for an entire week before finally giving her her present, which had been a fucking _crystal ball_ that she stared at religiously ever day for several months before ultimately giving it up, and sticking it in the back of her closet along with all the other abandoned divination paraphernalia. Derek found it, cracked apart and slightly blackened from the heat of fire, in the rubble of the house, years later.

“I know,” Stiles said. “I don’t, either.” He paused. “Can you – when you close your eyes, and, you know, think about him – can you see him? Like, really? I can’t really see my mom anymore. I can hear her voice, a little. But not – her face.”

“I don’t know,” Derek admitted. He mostly tried not to think about it, about any of them.

“Try,” Stiles said, and he did, closing his eyes and trying to remember his brother: the angularity of his body, his strange little smiles, the feeling you got from being around him, which was that the world was something entirely different than you had previously supposed.

He tried to imagine that his brother was standing in front of him, reaching down to ruffle his hair or take his hand. And there, all of the sudden, he was.

Derek opened his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I can see him.” Stiles smiled.


End file.
